Inside The Secret Digital Network Outing ICE Agents One Mask At A Time

Three days after vowing to identify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on social media, a Netherlands-based Irish activist Dominick Skinner was threatened with arrest by the U.S. government.

That was three months ago. Today, Skinner and his team have identified 300+ ICE agents through open-source investigations and using AI. 

When Skinner learned that Americans could face arrest for identifying ICE agents, he took the project upon himself. The rapid growth of his project, known as the ‘ICE List,’ owes as much to federal pushback as it does to volunteer effort. 

Activists are using open-source intelligence and AI to identify ICE agents

Image credits: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

When the government went public in Newsweek with threats of legal action, Skinner says it inadvertently gave him legitimacy. 

“If I were ICE, I wouldn’t mention activists like us at all,” Skinner told BP Daily. “That article gave us publicity — and then we got even more volunteers.”

Within months, what began as a handful of participants has turned into a structured network. One of the teams works in encrypted Telegram and Signal channels, where they endlessly scroll through social media, typing search strings like “ICE raid California” or “ICE raid Nevada.” 

When they spot a video or a photo of masked federal officers, they log it into a shared sheet with links and screenshots. Those files enter the “staging area,” a digital handoff zone on Proton Drive where volunteers have no access to the website itself and never see more than their piece of the process.

From there, open-source intelligence (OSINT) teams take over to identify the officers. 

Image credits: Alanastott

Skinner also manages an AI team and a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) team. The AI team uses a publicly available facial recognition tool, PimEyes, to build possible matches with agents that are then cross-checked with social media. 

The FOIA team files requests in relation to arrests they know happened, to get the name of the arresting officer. 

“Most of the work is still human-powered — hundreds of people scraping social media and passing info along,” Skinner said.

ICE List is one of the few websites that have launched in the past few months in opposition to the aggressive tactics used by U.S. President Donald Trump’s officers under the guise of deportation efforts. 

StopICE.net, created by political activist Sherman Austin, directly invites people to report sightings of suspected federal officers. It has more than 470,000 subscribers who get notified with alerts about ICE’s presence.

ICE argues its agents cover their faces for personal protection

Image credits: StopICE

Another such group, No Sleep for ICE, identifies hotels where agents are staying and encourages members to leave negative online reviews of these places. 

ICE has been at the center of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Agents appear in plain clothes as they raid facilities and arrest people they deem to be undocumented immigrants. More often than not, they are masked, making it impossible to identify them.

ICE defends its agents covering their faces, arguing that it protects them from harassment for doing their job. But for critics, this has become a symbol of unaccountable government force.

The argument has even reached Washington, D.C., where Democratic lawmakers have introduced bills like the VISIBLE Act and the No Masks for ICE Act to ban non-medical mask use by ICE agents and require visible identification. 

Republicans have mostly stood by the face covering. ICE agents “don’t deserve to be hunted online by activists using AI,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla.

While ICE has not directly responded to groups like Skinner’s, ICE spokesperson Tanya Roman said the masks “are for safety, not secrecy” and that such online listings threaten officers’ lives.  

White House officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, have called out these websites for endangering the lives of agents and their families. The Department of Homeland Security says incidents of assaults on ICE officers have been rising. Agency figures show at least 79 cases since Trump took office, compared to 10 during the same period in 2024.

Image credits: The White House/Flickr

ICE agents are primarily employees of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and at times also include Border Patrol, other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tactical teams, or federal law enforcement agencies. Now, ICE is hiring 10,000 agents, and many of them will be civilians. 

DHS notes that they have received more than 130,000 applications so far.

The U.S. government had undertaken a similar build-up of immigration officers between 2005 and 2011, a situation that had created serious problems. Training standards were lowered, background checks were rushed, and cases later emerged of cartel members and violent offenders who have slipped through the system. 

ICE is hiring 10,000 new agents and lowering the recruitment age and training period 

Reports of abuse and misconduct spiked, with agents implicated in kidnappings, sexual assaults, murders, and corruption scandals tied to drug cartels.

Today, with Trump promising what he called “the largest deportation operation” in U.S. history, the DHS is expanding again, backed by an unprecedented $170 billion budget for border and immigration enforcement. 

ICE’s aggressive recruitment drive allows applicants as young as 18 to serve, and has shortened training periods to get agents on the field as quick as possible. Critics warn that this approach could worsen longstanding issues of accountability and violence within ICE. 

This also opens up opportunities for people who may be driven by racial prejudice to use their position of power unjustly. 

Image credits: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The Washington Post interviewed potential candidates, shining a light on some of their intentions.

“I keep seeing these memes where Indians are bragging about taking our tech jobs,” a 36-year-old candidate told The Washington Post. “So I said, ‘Oh yeah? Well I’m going to work with these guys that are going to arrest you, slam your face on the pavement and send you home.’”

The DHS will be condensing training for new hires from 13 weeks to eight weeks, officials recently told NBC News. This would include reducing Spanish language classes and a firearms course. Advocates told The Guardian that the existing training, as it is now, was failing to prevent misconduct. 

With training periods shortened and agents not being able to communicate with undocumented immigrants, the new strategy points to an increased focus on arresting more people and less on reducing illegal immigration into the U.S. 

The lack of training has been an advantage for Skinner’s team because many of the new recruits are still not aware of what to post online, and at times, they share information bragging about the arrest they’ve made. 

“They call these raids ‘going hunting,’ that’s the ICE lingo for the arrests, and they’re not afraid to share it on their social media,” Skinner said. “In many cases, the smoking gun is their own emissions.”

But ICE does not take websites like the ICE List lightly. Skinner’s website has been taken down three times at the instruction of the U.S. government, until he was finally told he would not be allowed to use any U.S.-based domains. 

Skinner insists that everything he’s been doing is legal under U.S. law, since they are using publicly available data. 

Bondi cautioned that the Justice Department was reviewing a site similar to the one Austin operates and warned its creator to “be careful.” Skinner, meanwhile, has received death threats and unsolicited sexually explicit images depicting genitalia — which are illegal to send in the U.S. — often from Republicans.

Immigrant rights groups have drawn harsh comparisons between ICE and Nazi Germany, calling ICE “Gestapo,” after Germany’s notorious secret police force. 

Rights groups have compared ICE to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo

Image credits: Sarah Reingewirtz/Getty Images

Jeremy O’Hara, a longtime ICE agent, told The Washington Post, “It very much bothers me, a lot of the comments referring to my people as the Gestapo or Nazis.” 

According to O’Hara, officers conceal their identities to protect themselves and their families from potential threats, and swift arrests are important to avoid conflicts with onlookers.

Lists like the ICE list also pose an ethical issue around privacy and releasing data without the consent of officers. At the same time, it is a way for people to hold the government accountable and reclaim some autonomy.

Emily Tucker, director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, argued, “What we have now is the federal government has essentially unleashed an anonymized, militarized police force on its own people, and people are doing the most basic things they can think of to try to take back some sense of agency and security.”

“In that context, it’s important that the police are recognizable and known to the community because it’s the community they’re supposed to be accountable to,” she told The Washington Post. 

Image credits: The White House/Flickr

Since returning to the White House, Trump has prioritized immigration enforcement and issued a series of executive orders that declare a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border. He has also sought to end birthright citizenship for children of unauthorized immigrants. 

The administration has largely closed access to the asylum process on the southern border and ended temporary humanitarian protections for people fleeing prosecution in their country of origin.

A heavily advertised campaign by the government also encourages immigrants to self-deport, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying, “Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you. You will never return.”

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